NVIDIA TegraZone

In one fell swoop, it appears the the folks at Madfinger and NVIDIA have crushed the rest of Android with a game that takes the platform to a whole new level of gaming intensity. We got to check this game out earlier this month in its pre-release state, and today's the day the full version is released on the Android Market and through the official NVIDIA Tegra Zone. Is your Android rough and tough enough to bust a cap in a bunch of mutants, robots, and mutant robot hybrids? It all depends on if your processor is a Tegra! Ours is, right here on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and we're going hands-on again now with the final build.

It's time for all you mobile gamers out there to have a brand new heart attack because Shadowgun is newly optimized and ready for release on NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor-toting Android devices. October 26th is the time and $4.99 is about to be the price - and let me tell you right now, it's worth every penny. Madfinger Games tells us that the game will eventually be released on all Android devices (provided they're powerful enough), but we're in it for the Tegra - optimization for the win!

As you might well know, it's not often that we review a single app for a mobile device here on SlashGear - not unless its so massive, so awesome, so significant that it cannot be ignored. That's what we've got right here, folks, a third-person shooter by the name of Shadowgun, made by Madfinger games for iOS and Android - today the news being the optimized version for the Android-based NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor. We've checked the game out on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and it's time to show you the next plateau for immersive mobile gaming.

UPDATE: the final release version of this game is out now, check out our follow-up post and hands-on video once you get down reading about it here, then pick the game up in the market!

Those interested in the processing power of mobile devices running any and all operating systems should be aware of NVIDIA's Project Kal-El, a quad core CPU the group is prepping for a late 2011 released. We first learned about this project (and future projects with similar code-names) back at Mobile World Congress 2011 where we also got our first eyes-on look at the processing power it presented via a game called Great Battles: Medieval. It was here that we got our first glance at a quad core processor working on a mobile platform, and as it was said back then, multi-core processing is, and will continue to be, massively important to mobile computing. What NVIDIA provides us today is a stripped-down and simple look at why the next generation, quad core, is much better than dual core in basically every way.

Today the folks at NVIDIA have announced officially their web-based version of NVIDIA Tegra Zone, a Tegra 2 dual-core tablet and super phone processor specific portal for apps, news, and news about apps. The apps you're going to be seeing here, as shown in our full review of mobile app version of the market, are on the whole available for NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor toting devices exclusively, and with this web-based addition to this ecosystem, the Tegra Zone becomes just as versatile as the Android Marketplace itself - or certainly close to it. It's like a guide for ultimate dual-core wins.

NVIDIA promised big things for their quad-core Kal-El chip, the next-gen Tegra processor that pairs a quartet of CPU cores with twelve GPU cores, and the company is demonstrating some of that goodness at Computex 2011 this week. First up is a gaming demo of a new, homegrown game, Glowball, running on a prototype Kal-El powered Android Honeycomb tablet. As you can see in the video after the cut, the quad-core chip allows for high-quality dynamic lighting effects with responsiveness you simply couldn't get from a dual-core like the Tegra 2.